British politicians enjoy lecturing their continental European counterparts on the virtues of a deregulated and flexible economy.
But on the subject of what the flexible economy is supposed to deliver, namely superior company performance and productivity, they fall strangely silent.
This is because, measured by output per hour, the UK still lags rather than leads. Recent figures show that in 2004 US workers added 34 percent more value per hour than their UK counterparts, Germans 11 percent more, and the French 25 percent more.
This frustrates and perplexes ministers and their aides, who have spent the last 30 years using the UK as a testbed for a no-alternative economic experiment in the abovementioned flexibility and deregulation, only to find that while the macroeconomic levers they can pull do affect productivity, it's the microeconomic processes inside companies that they can't reach -- at least not directly -- that matter more. It's not the economy: it's management, stupid.
Reinforcement for this view comes from a new report from the London School of Economics' (LSE) Center for Economic Performance, McKinsey & Co and Stanford University entitled "Management Practice and Productivity: Why They Matter," which supports the common-sense notion that the way firms are managed is one of the most important ways of distinguishing between them.
Scoring 4,000 medium-sized European, Asian and US manufacturing companies on the quality of their operations, performance and talent management, the report suggests that, as with productivity, the UK is in the second league for management, behind the top tier of the US, Sweden, Japan and Germany, alongside France, Italy and Poland, and ahead of the dunces of Greece, India and China.
However, these figures conceal some interesting subtexts.
The difference in national averages is largely accounted for by the "tail" of badly run firms -- on the chosen criteria, 8 percent of UK companies fall into this category compared with 2 percent in the US. In India, 20 percent of companies are badly run, yet the best Indian firms are a match for anyone. Multinationals operating in India, for example, are among the best-managed anywhere, with the top 30 percent of Indian firms being better managed than the average in the UK. As the researchers note, combined with low labor costs, this makes them formidable competitors, irrespective of national averages.
Ownership matters, too. Multinationals, particularly US ones, are the best managed everywhere. Interestingly, private-equity-owned firms aren't notably better managed than the UK average and are less well managed than the top tier of national leaders, multinationals and firms under dispersed shareholder ownership. So much for the supposed performance advantages conferred by their governance arrangements.
The researchers argue that the study is good news for companies, "suggesting that they have access to dramatic improvements in performance simply by adopting good practices used elsewhere."
For policymakers, the challenge is harder -- getting the good-practice message across to the poor-performing tail that brings the average down.
But not so fast. In a kind of infinite regression, complementary research in progress under the aegis of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) hints that "adopting good practices used elsewhere" is anything but simple.
That is because managers are astonishingly bad at assessing their own performance. More than 85 percent of managers in the LSE study believed their company was better managed than the average, and self-assessed scores "have almost no link" with firm performance or the marks awarded by the researchers.
More broadly, the AIM research identifies the context for good practice as critical. Indirect support for that comes from the LSE finding that although there are relative differences in national scores (the UK scores well for people management and less well for operations, for example), "no single dimension provides the key for improved management performance" -- good firms are well managed across all performance aspects. The implication is that a firm can't just import an attractive practice: It has to have the underpinnings in place to support it -- including the awareness that it is needed in the first place.
So when it is said that British managers are notoriously reluctant to adopt promising practices, this is true but not very helpful, tantamount to saying that the UK is not very good at management.
To break out of the circle of inertia, the key seems to be to get managers looking both outward -- as much to customers as to other companies to get an accurate bearing on their real competitive position; and inward -- to develop their own "signature" practices, based on their own values and history, that will distinguish them from others in the eyes of customers.
As with fruit and vegetables, home-grown is best.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS